Web Dasein

The rise of Scratch (a next-gen Logo, from what I can tell), Codecademy, and Google’s App Inventor has everyone talking about learning to code, including, apparently, the Mayor of New York City.

Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Exchange, thinks this a horrible idea.

In the case of the mayor, and other adults with non-coding-related jobs, he has a valid point. No one who has a good job already should learn to code unless they want to, and probably they won’t want to unless they are considering switching jobs.

That being said, the “let’s learn to code” is good, on the whole, because its real focus is on children, who, presumably, haven’t already decided that they want to be the Mayor of New York City when they grow up. Exposure to programming is good for them, and, considering the current shortage of IT professionals in the US, good for us as well.

Moreover, Atwood misses a crucial point in his blog post when he says the coding movement “falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math.” Ideally, and this was the vision of Seymour Papert and the creator of Logo, teaching coding is a means to teach children math in a more practical, creative, and engaging way with the aid of computers. Insofar as that is the focus, I think Atwood is presenting us with a false dilemma. We should teach children coding not so they can become the next Javascript wizards, but to give them an algorithmic way of looking at the world. Now that would be a transferrable skill.

Reading transhumanist literature (Tipler, Kurtzweil) and fiction (Accelerando) tonight and thinking:

To be human is to embrace finitude. The desire for all knowledge, all pleasure, and all power must be denied us until we are one with our Creator, renewed in righteousness.

Unless one envisions a society characterized by widespread repentance all moral science fiction must be dystopian, since scientific advancement alone will lead to our society’s destruction.

Boston at the height of spring:
The girls walking down Minot St.,
A young man standing on a porch eating an apple.
Petals falling slowly into a still-covered pool

Discipling is personal growth directed toward the formation of Godly character.

Jesus’ resurrection is His justification, in the sense of vindication: a public declaration of His righteousness, which He could then graciously grant to us. He was “delivered up for our trangressions and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).

And how did Jesus have this righteousness? Through His perfect keeping of the Law for the 33 years of His Law, by which He, and He alone, could be the perfect fulfillment of Psalm 119, revived according to God’s Word. As J. Gresham Machen said, “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”

the moon tonight is a crucible of gold
set against silver, deepening blue